Walter Helsper

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Portrait photo by Walter Helsper

Walter Helsper (born July 1, 1927 in Herdorf , † June 28, 1992 in Siegen ) was a German painter and draftsman.

While his extensive and multi-layered work of pen drawings , graphics , oil paintings and plaster sculptures initially showed strongly naturalistic-descriptive compositions, new artistic movements shaped his later impasto style up to the non-representational pigment image. The act of drawing in an emotionally dynamic way was an elementary form of expression for him. The artist's strong interest in people and their behavior is evident in the large number of sheets depicting grotesque, desperate, caricatured and exposed people. In Walter Helsper's painting , however, the landscape motif dominates.

Walter Helsper: untitled, 1992

life and work

Walter Helsper was born in Herdorf / Sieg in 1927 as the son of the hut steward Ewald Helsper and his wife Louise Helsper and grew up in a religious family home. Even as a child he drew and painted constantly and without any instructions. When he attended elementary school (1933–1941), his talent for drawing was first noticed and he then received training as a church painter (1941–1944). During the Second World War , he accompanied the withdrawal of the Wehrmacht in the Netherlands, Poland and Northern Germany.

Walter Helsper attended the Siegerland painting school from 1948 to 1950 and worked as a freelance poster painter and window dresser in the 1950s . At the same time he devoted himself to his artistic work from then on.

At the end of the 1950s, Walter Helsper first attracted greater attention with an open-air exhibition of large panorama pictures showing various motifs of the city of Siegen. From 1961 he exhibited his work regularly. A move to Cologne followed , where he worked with the painter Ewald Hackler . Through his work at the Cologne City Theater, many artists and actors met in the shared studio . In 1964 Helsper returned to Siegen. A six-month stay in Spain in Altea followed, financed by the design of exhibition stands . Walter Helsper received further new impulses in the artistic field through his friendship with the Siegen artist Herbert Schäfer, with whom he developed a new type of monotype in 1968 . Both caused a sensation in 1969 with a happening in front of an audience and a highly regarded exhibition in a hotel building in Siegen (“Hotel Monopol”) which was in a state of disrepair.

Another important companion at this time was the writer Wolf Kühne, who was the first to try to aesthetically assess Helsper's works and to arouse understanding for this art among the mostly distant public at the time. From 1972 to 1973 Walter Helsper ran the artist restaurant "Belle Epoque" as a restaurateur in Siegen. At that time, his studio and permanent exhibition room were in Siegen's old town. Helsper also worked successively as an art teacher and as a guest lecturer in the art department of the University of Siegen since the 1970s . From 1985 until his death, Walter Helsper lived in a farmhouse in Netphen-Eschenbach . Here, in the midst of nature, he found the themes for his landscape paintings, which are now in the foreground of his work. In the last years of his life he dared to try a new style of painting by working with pure color pigments in multiple layers and without binding agents, creating color compositions of unusual luminosity and dynamism.

  • Walter Helsper: untitled, 1970

  • Walter Helsper: untitled, 1970

  • Walter Helsper: Seated Woman with Candlestick , 1978

  • Walter Helsper: Expulsion of the Hägar, 1967

  • Walter Helsper: Bishop, 1991

  • Walter Helsper: untitled, 1991

  • Walter Helsper: Pulpit Birches , 1986

Exhibitions (selection)

From 1970 onwards, Walter Helsper regularly took part in exhibitions of the Siegerland Artists' Working Group in the municipal gallery Haus Seel in Siegen. Helsper designed several wall paintings for public spaces, for example at the Richerfeldschule, Siegen-Eiserfeld and on the building of the Irle brewery in Siegen.

The Siegen filmmaker Ralf Schröder accompanied the artist Walter Helsper on various occasions with the video camera since the mid-1980s. The result was a 40-minute compilation of informative character, presented in 2012, in which Helsper himself also speaks in detail about his work.

  • Studio photo by Walter Helsper

  • Happening in the Hotel Monopol, Siegen 1969

  • Walter Helsper: Action Painting

  • DVD cover G'rade the past, that was the secret, 2012

Reviews

(...) This interest in the traces of impermanence in pictures and his claim to create these traces himself and not to leave them to the ravages of time is particularly expressed in Walter Helsper's graphics and oil paintings. Helsper himself summed up his view with the following words: "Pictures only live through the past".

Although his drawing style changed several times over the course of his long career and he tried out many techniques, the predominant characteristic of Walter Helsper's drawings remains the quick and sure line. Helsper usually only developed the composition during the drawing process. His drawing style was spontaneous and characterized by the painterly openness of the design. Hints were often enough for him to get an impression. (...)

Kirsten Schwarz, art historian

The deadly serious, thoughtful Walter Helsper, who experienced the horrors of war on the Western Front, drew apocalypse, inferno, terror, fear and despair with his pen - and all of this also marked him. He drew everything human from the primeval ground, the swamp. The comedian and ironker sometimes seemed to be standing there guarding, wearing a bizarre, grotesque and comical mask on horror. But then it was the irrepressible joy of existence, enjoyment with all the senses, that gained the upper hand.

Maria Anspach , local writer and journalist

literature

  • Community of heirs Walter Helsper (ed.): Unreality practice, the painter and draftsman Walter Helsper. Siegen 1998, ISBN 978-3-00001-979-1 .
  • Herbert Schäfer (Ed.): Sketches one day, the painter and draftsman Walter Helsper. Cologne 1997.
  • Walter Helsper: Just in the past, that was the secret. Documentation by Ralf Schröder. Victories 2012.

Web links

Commons : Walter Helsper  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ heirs Walter Helsper (ed.): Practice unreality, the painter and illustrator Walter Helsper . Siegen 1998, ISBN 978-3-00-001979-1 .
personal data
SURNAME Helsper, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and draftsman
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Herdorf
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1992
Place of death Wins